Tabula Rasa
by JayBee-Bug
Summary: Post-Fallen/Homecoming. Daniel gets a new apartment and spends some time musing in the empty room. 1st-person POV.


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Title: Tabula Rasa

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Author: JayBee-Bug

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Rating: G

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Feedback: jaybee_bug@yahoo.com

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Summary: Post-Fallen/Homecoming. Daniel gets a new apartment and spends some time musing in the empty room. 1st-person POV.

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Four blank walls. 

I sit with my back against the wall, on the plain tan carpet, rough under my hands, recently steam-cleaned. The air smells stale, stuffy, mixed with the light scent of carpet shampoo. The single window in this room, high on the wall I lean against, is shut. So is the door opposite my wall. The space is entirely enclosed, the air, completely still, the area, utterly silent. If I listen closely, there is a muffled background sound of the highway, barely audible. It reminds me I am still on Earth. It's always such a surprise when we leave this planet, how the subtle differences have such a powerful impact. One grows so accustomed to the constant background sound of airplanes and automobiles and other people, that they forget what it's really like for things to be completely silent. Only on an uninhabited world, millions of light-years from Earth, where the air has never met the burning of fossil fuels, the sounds of machines, where the ground has never been tread by another human being, virgin soil. Only there do you realize how loud and crowded and busy things are back at home. Or whatever you'd like to call here. 

In this room, right now, though, all of that seems to fade away. I can nearly tune it out, like a radio in the background playing something you can't quite recognize. It isn't too difficult to just pretend I've never been here, that this is another alien world, and I have nothing to connect the distant sounds to, no memories or images of the reality outside. And then I can let it all drop away, so that all that exists is me in this room. These four blank walls, and nothing more. 

And then I realize how genuine a statement that is, how it encompasses everything about me in a single sentence. When I returned to this plane of reality, corporeal once more, there was nothing. I was a _tabula rasa_; a blank slate. There is a school of thought that says we are all born _tabula rasas_ into this world, without anything more than a glimmer that is our own. If that is so, then what I experienced truly was a rebirth. A birth is supposed to be a time of rejoice, the miracle of life and creation. Never do people speak of the terror. To suddenly exist, and have nothing, be nothing, entirely alone. There is a sort of primal terror that grips you, and you don't even understand why you feel that way, but you do, from the center of your being. There is something about the emptiness that makes you cry out in horror, and for a time, all that you know, all that is real to you, is that terror. I think on some level I knew that the comfort and peace of the higher plane was now broken. Ejected rudely from that reality, dumped into an alien world, and expected to start filling that slate with the fresh, new handwriting of my own. 

Language. I did have something of my own after all. It did not take long for strangers to come across me and speak to me, and I found myself answering. Understanding. Comprehending. At least I had the words in which to fill that slate. Someplace to start. The more time I spent on my new world, the more I discovered. I was not an empty man. There must have been a Before. I was reincarnated--somewhere inside of me, waiting to be unraveled, was a forgotten past. Somebody had wrapped it up so tightly inside of me, at first it was barely more than a glimmer. Maybe nothing. But every day, I tried to expand it. To reach it. To unravel more of it's delicate threads. The struggle exhausted my mind. I spent most of my time in my tent, hardly venturing outside into my village. The noise and colors distracted me from my internal search. They called me _Arrom_, naked one. I can't even remember how many nights I ached over trying to recall my name. Somehow I felt if I had that, then I would have the leverage needed to pull the rest out from its knotted ball in my memory. In the end, I resigned myself to _Arrom_, accepted my new identity. I was simply too tired to go on without it, without a name, a place to call home. It was a sweet surrender to start living my life as one of those people. I started spending more time outside my tent, among my people, living what passed as a normal life for them. Or starting to. 

And then one day, strangers came into the village. Their clothes were like none I had ever seen, and they carried packs and belts of strange tools, which seemed harshly unnatural and alien, angled and metallic. I am not lost on the irony that I was experiencing something every single anthropologist strives for, to be able to look at myself, my own culture, through the eyes of another, with absolute clarity. They spoke in a language I did not recognize--military jargon, which even now is the one language I seem least fluent in, despite myself--and looked at me in a way that nobody else had ever done before. With recognition. 

They guided me back to the center of the village, gently, but it still made me nervous. And as I came down the steps, one of the strangers caught my eye and used a word. His expression and tone were all the context I needed to know that it was my name. The feeling . . . was overwhelming. In that moment, he had given me what felt like a gift, but a horribly terrifying one. My name. He knew my name. 

The others with him also looked shocked and maybe even pleased. God, the way they looked at me, I felt so awful, so guilty. They knew me and I felt I should know them, I really did. Ever since I had been brought back to my village, I had been half-expecting some strangers to come and find me, for _somebody_ to arrive and know who I was. To tell me what happened and to bring me home. The problem was, in my fantasy, I always was able to recognize them when they came for me. These people, however, truly were strangers to me. 

It was too much. I retreated back to my tent, unable to stand their eyes on me, their questioning tones, the repeated use of my name. The disappointment on their faces. I had known them for ten seconds and already I had managed to let them down. I couldn't do it. He followed me. I heard his footsteps crunching the gravel soon after I sat down, and knew it was him who wouldn't let me run away. He had that look in his eye, of such enormous intensity, when I had seen him. I knew he'd refuse to back down. It scared me. 

"Please leave me alone, " I asked quietly, knowing it would be ignored. He told me his name and reiterated mine. Words stumbled out of my mouth, trying to explain myself, desperately wanting him to stay and to leave at the same time. Our conversation was completely off-putting. The things he told me were not the things I'd imagined I'd be told about my life. He was blunt and confusing, and I couldn't decipher his humor from what was serious. My instinct was to not trust him. But at the same time, I felt like he was being honest, in his own strange way. It was a bizarre contradiction. 

I was relieved when he left, my head spinning in confusion. I was only alone for a few minutes when somebody else approached my tent. It was her--much gentler, less confrontational. She asked for permission before entering. It was easier talking to her, and some of my fears evaporated. When she offered to take me back with them, I was surprised at how calmly I answered. She quietly left my tent and I didn't have to think about it long. I was finally going home. 

I draw my legs up so I can wrap my arms around them and thread my fingers. The light in here is cast by a small ceiling lamp encased in a plastic bubble. It hardly casts any shadow, only makes the white room a clear, visible picture. I had thought that after I went home, all would become clear. I would find myself, and the emptiness inside would melt away. But things haven't been that simple. I've remembered most of my life now. The things I did, the places I've been. The people I've loved. And the more I mull it over, the more I realize it's never been that simple for me. There is no single place I can point to and call "home". Home has been so many different things for me over the years. So many different places. When my parents were still alive, we moved more times then I could count on two hands, and for a child, that was too many to keep track of. When they were gone, I was shuffled around from place to place like a game of hot potato. When I was old enough to make it on my own, struggling to make ends meet with my education and any odd job I could pick up, apartments were always changing. Towns were always changing. 

I'd have to say the two most stable times in my life were the years in college when I first started gaining success in my field of study, and my time on Abydos. The first one obviously went downhill the moment I started sharing my unpopular theories. And the second one came to an abrupt end at the return of the enemy. 

But even during those times, home was not a clear-cut thing. I felt home and was happy, yes. For a time, home meant a fairly nice dorm and a semi-stable income for the first time in my life, and a community I could feel I belonged to. I had friends. A job. A car. I dated and wrote papers and hiked in the park when I got too stuffed up from reading. I lived the closest thing I've had to a normal life on Earth. And all the while, a passion consumed me, and a mystery begged to be solved. The theories I wove from my research would eventually prove to be my downfall from that life. 

For a time, home meant the open deserts of Abydos, the grandiose buildings and the grassroots civilization of the Abydonians, newly freed from their slavemasters and beautifully intelligent, compassionate people. I had a wife and a society light-years from Earth. I spent my mornings grinding grain for our bread and rebuilding our city. I was _living_ something that anthropologists spent their entire lives studying from mere bits and pieces to try and fit together. A true living history, an ancient culture alive and thriving. And I had been right. The theories that destroyed one way of life paved the way for a new one. 

Yes, they were homes of sorts. There's no denying that. But . . . there's also no denying that they never felt completely my own. Something was always slightly off. Some mornings when I awoke on Abydos, I'd lean up in alarm, thinking the air didn't smell quite right, or wondering why everything was so quiet. It seemed too quiet. Too beautiful here. And as I read the walls of the ruins, and the starmaps, I'd think of Earth and of the people I had left behind. I was an Earth native born and raised, and wasn't I just trying to outrun it? Wasn't I hiding here, light-years away, where nobody could possibly find me? 

College felt the same way. I learned to love it, of course I did. I learned to be happy and content. Just like I learned everything else at school. But there was always a slight sense of artificialness to it. As if I was missing something important but for the life of me, couldn't define exactly what. I brushed off this feeling as best I could and enjoyed school for what it was. But it didn't take long for my life to take its next dip, my path to reveal its next sudden turn in the road. Up and down, and all over the map. My life's always been so unexpected, so restless, so changing. 

So that's why I'm staring at these four blank walls now. They seem to me to be the perfect, physical representation of how I feel. I might remember who I am now, but I truly am starting over. Again. Back to square one, as Jack would put it. My memories of the higher plane are vague and blurry, and mostly beyond my reach. I have a feeling they will become clearer with time. And when they do, they probably won't do much to make my choices any clearer, or explain my life in any more detail than I already understand. 

My gaze drops to the golden knob on the door, which slowly turns. Gently, the white door is creaked open, and somebody steps inside and shuts it behind them. My eyes follow up to his face, surprised at how differently the room feels by his simple presence. No longer an empty room-- no longer a blank slate. 

He gives the smallest of smiles and comes over quietly, to lean against my wall and slide down into a sitting position beside me. We both continue to gaze straight ahead, but it's different now. The stale air no longer smells just of carpet shampoo, but of earth and tanbark, the scent he exhales beside me. 

"So . . . "

His voice, a casual tone, cuts the silence, and has a nice echo over the empty walls. I turn my head to look at him, his auburn gaze watching me closely. 

"What you think? "

His expression echoes his question, grizzled eyebrows lifted, corner of his mouth quirked just slightly. I think I could teach a class on the complexities of Jack's subtle expressions, and the layers of meaning each one contains. It's taken years to study and decode, and I'm still learning more every day. 

"It's empty, " I tell him. 

The slight quirk becomes almost a smile, as he looks over the empty room. 

"They must have valued you for your observation powers, " he answers, familiar, heavy sarcasm a colorful addition to the room. 

"It'll be good, though. We'll fill it up. "

He looks to me encouragingly. He has no idea of the metaphor I have been chasing around in my mind for the past twenty minutes in here, so doesn't realize the double entendre to his statement. Or maybe he does. It's always so hard to tell with Jack. Either way, it's surprisingly comforting. 

"You better be ready to do some lifting. I've already managed to collect quite a few things, " I say, a smile twisting onto my own face. 

He clasps one of my shoulders and answers in a warm tone. 

"That's what we can always count on you for, Daniel. Total pack-rat. Don't worry, I'm yours for the day. Just no pianos. Don't want to throw my back out. "

"Sounds good to me, " I agree. We both get up off the floor and leave the room, to retrieve my boxes from the truck. It'll be nice to have a place off-base. Being so far underground's never managed to feel very comfortable. 

This apartment's not quite home either, but it's a start. I have a feeling that when Jack and I are done with it, it'll start feeling cozier. Maybe even almost like home. 


End file.
